Posted by
drpete on Monday, September 28, 2009 9:44:47 AM
It's a menace, say "environmental" groups, characterizing today's American toilet paper. Soft, plush, multi-ply -- think tush-friendly -- rolls of the disposable staple, even for urban outdoorsmen, are killing mother earth. Apparently, we're literally wiping out our pristine forests. These always-mad-and-unhappy champions of anything anti-capitalist -- Bless their little hearts . . . a pantload -- are lobbying (aka "whining") for mandating that all toilet paper be made from recycled paper products. Greenpeace, always somewhat cheeky, has had a 4 1/2-year campaign against Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kleenex and Cottonelle.
According to the forest products industry, 5% of forest production goes to toilet paper and tissues, 26% to cardboard containers and packaging (with about half from recycled), and 3% to newspapers. Large old-growth trees yield long fibers while small young trees and recycled paper yield short fibers. Long fibers equal soft while young and recycled equal rough. With reverence strictly reserved for things non-human, the "environmentalist" tree huggers opine that for mature, old-growth, majestic redwoods and other trees, this is a cruel and ignoble and unworthy end. A stain on our culture, as it were.
Producers say that they want to cooperate with the environmentalists (aka "anti-capitalist quivering lip biters"), but consumers keep demanding "soft". Seems to be a matter of taste? And it's one thing to face off with Greenpeace or even Algore, but one doesn't want a pom-pommed cheerleader or debutante to get her thong all in a wad. It's called "butt floss". Take a crack at that!
When I queried frequent-commenter to gumballs, JT, he said that "recycled resulted in a smear campaign." I countered that the gubmint was test-floating the idea of bailing out newspapers. Since fewer and fewer people are reading those rags, maybe they could go straight from the press to slicers, there to be made into 4"-wide strips. All of downtown D.C. could transition from rolls to stacks. With what's been coming outa there recently, there are thousands of legislators, staffers, lobbyists, press corps and czars who've been spending lots and lots of potentially-productive time sitting above porcelain.
Who knows, maybe the N.Y. Times and Washington Post will make more sense read "backward". Heck, if we formatted bills in columns and sent them also to the slicer, maybe Congressman Conyers could take some quiet time to read them a couple of slices at a sitting.
Maybe, if we made it less comfortable, these "leaders" would tighten the sphincter and dump less. Indeed, we don't need another march on Washington. What we need is a million-septic-truck roll on the Capitol so we can spread -- redistribute? --the wealth. I'm just flush with anticipation.
Of course, when the loaded trucks re-cross the beltway, we'll now have the ecological problem of having to change our poop-to-pulp balance. What do you want as legacy, pristine forests or poopy deserts? Maybe, we can get NASA to take the D.C discharge and launch it -- using biofuel --to another planet. I'd ask for planet nominations . . . but that would be way way way too easy.